Ciphers and Civilizations
By Blair Moffett
Imagine, if you will, a people who had a complex written language that
suffered no major changes for more than a thousand years; whose
cultural development and intellectual sophistication allowed them to
conceive of periods of earth history embracing ninety million years
and more. Imagine that this nation employed a civil calendar more
accurate than the present Gregorian reckoning, adopted by Europe in
the sixteenth century to repair the glaring inaccuracies of the Julian
calendar in effect since 46 BC. Add to these the construction of great
and beautiful cities having connecting roads, development of the
plastic arts to a pitch as fine as any in the world, and the existence
of a highly moral citizenry governed by law and good customs. Finally,
imagine that this nation's thinkers employed the revolutionary
mathematical concept of the zero or cipher -- without which you can't
have a positional system -- in their calendrics and astronomical
computations.
Neither the classical Greek nor Roman civilizations ever developed the
zero. Just try mathematical calculation using Roman numerals! We take
the positional system for granted, failing to recall that the zero was
adopted by Europe only in the fifteenth century. Now, applying our own
standards, would it be an exaggeration to describe our supposed nation
as eminently civilized? But, such a nation has indeed existed. It is
known to scholars as that of the Maya of Central America, whose
peoples are said to have flourished in the northern areas of that
region from before 1000 BC to about 1000 AD. Pierre Ivanof, a close
student of the Mayan system of time reckoning, comments upon its
superiority over our own:
The Mayans invented a solar "civil" year of 365 days. We know,
however, that they made calendrical emendations and developed a more
precise notion of solar time than that embodied in our own calendar.
Thus, the true sidereal year (that is, the exact amount of time it
takes the earth to revolve around the sun, as determined by the
precision instruments of modern astronomy) consisted of 365.2422 days.
In our Gregorian calendar -- making due allowance for leap years --
the year has 365.2425 days, while the year of the ancient Mayans
numbered 365.2420 days. . . . we learn that the Mayans never ceased
throughout the centuries to study astronomy. Their observations were
recorded carefully and exactly on long strips of fattened bark rubbed
with limestone and folded like an accordion. -- Mayan Enigma, pp.
86-7
Among other ancient nations only one, the Hindu peoples of the Indian
subcontinent, is known to have developed a system of calendrics
accounting for such vast periods of time. For computing the age of the
earth and various geological and other epochs, as well as the age of
mankind, the learned Brahman caste still employs a Tamil calendar
derived from archaic astronomical data, known as the "Tirukkanda
Panchanga" (cf. The Secret Doctrine, 2:49-51).
This calendar contains a calculation of something over three hundred
millions of years for the age of the present earth since sedimentation
occurred, and a period of somewhat more than eighteen million years
since the first appearance of our mankind.
The Hindus are also the only older people besides the Mayans who are
known to have employed the concept of zero in their mathematics. In
fact, our culture obtained the zero only because Arab scholars in
Bagdad in the seventh century AD translated a Hindu text on astronomy
and thus rediscovered the zero. Subsequently, an Arab mathematical
treatise employing it was translated into Latin, and lo! we gained
this vital idea, although it did not come into general use in the West
until many centuries later. A few Sumerian tablets show the faint
beginnings of calculations based on a positional system, but no more.
By comparison, the ancient great Egyptian civilization recorded no
period of time exceeding five million years, and their zodiac, used to
reckon cycles of time, was only 75,000 to 80,000 years old. The zodiac
of the classical Greeks has been shown to be only some 17,000 years
old. Greek reckoning of time, as well as their zodiac, was thus even
younger than that of Egypt. Evidently the perspective of the archaic
Hindu and Maya thinkers concerning the true age of the earth was much
more like that of our modern earth scientists!
When it comes to human history, however, our scholars hesitate and
grow uncertain about man as civilized homo sapiens even as late as
10,000 BC, whereas Hindu savants routinely regard him as at least
eighteen million years old -- and if we could read more of the Mayan
historical records we might find in them a similar calculation. Only
recently have Western investigators produced physical evidence pu****ng
the age of thinking man back toward remote epochs. Ancient human
fossils found by Richard Leakey in East Africa are "remarkably
reminiscent of modern man," with a brain capacity considerably larger
than that of other hominids, while the leg bones "are practically
indistinguishable" from those of humans today. He places this evolved
human at more than 2.5 million years ago.
The ancient Hindu and Mayan civilizations exhibit other interesting
convergences. Hindu records say that a member of a great race which
preceded ours, a highly-developed personage known as Asuramaya,
learned all the basic cosmic cycles and used his knowledge to
determine the durations of the various geological and cyclical periods
of human evolution. The chronology and computations of their still
used Tamil calendar, say the Brahmans, are based upon the works of
Asuramaya and upon carefully maintained collateral zodiacal records.
Their most ancient extant work on astronomy, the Surya-Siddhanta, says
that Asuramaya lived toward the end of the Krita-yuga, a former age
that ended approximately 2,165,000 years before the present. This
would place Asuramaya at something less than 2.5 million years ago.
The name Asuramaya is a compound of the two Sanskrit words, Asura and
Maya. The personage himself is Maya, the prefix Asura signifying that
Maya was of the Asuras, a name given to a certain caste or people of
the great prehistoric race that preceded our own, or Aryan humanity.
The word Asura derives from surya, Sanskrit for the sun. In accordance
with the archaic Indian manner of describing the matter, the
astronomer named Maya was said to have gained his knowledge from
studying the sun. The sun and its encircling planets also occupied the
central attention of the Mayan astronomer caste in Central America.
Although we do not have sufficient information to connect this ancient
Indian astronomer directly with the Mayas of the early Central
American civilizations, the similarity of the names is, on the
surface, an intriguing one. It becomes more so in light of the rather
striking similitude between the astronomical knowledge, mathematics,
and time-reckoning systems of the two cultures. We know very little as
yet about the origins of pre- and protohistoric peoples, about their
secular migrations and the likelihood of prehistoric links between
them. Such links are quite within the range of possibility even though
unsuspected by some modern scholars, and it ill behooves us to make
less than the fullest use possible of what facts we have in the effort
to unravel our true evolutionary background. We do know that as far
back as human tradition reaches, even to Cain and Abel, the first sons
of the Biblical Adam and Eve, wherever man went in the world he found
other peoples there before him, other races, with whom he fought or
accommodated himself, as the case may be.
The early Hindu thinkers visualized the passage of a race from its
birth to its close as embracing four distinct phases or yugas, and
they said that races overlapped each other in duration. According to
their calculations, the world, in other words our present race,
entered the fourth of its phases, which they term the Kali yuga or
Iron age, in the year 3102 BC. This event coincided with the death of
Krishna, whom they describe as an avatara or incarnation of a lofty
divine-spiritual being or messiah. His departure from the earth is
said to have ushered in new and different conditions affecting our
race.
Modern students of the ancient Mayan numerical glyphs have found that
the dating of major series of events noted on Mayan stelae invariably
give such reckonings in terms of the time elapsed since a date known
as 4 Ahau 8 ***hu. They know that for the Maya chroniclers this date
represented a commencement point in time-reckoning of such awesome
magnitude that it was central to all else in subsequent Maya history;
but they don't know what it meant or why it was so im****tant to the
latter.
These students differ among themselves as to what the exact year 4
Ahau 8 ***hu signified because of persisting uncertainties of
numerical glyph interpretation, but they all agree that it occurred in
the fourth millennium BC. That year has been variously given as 3135,
3113, 3373, and 3632 BC. At present the year 3113 BC is considered the
most reliable of these. Remember that the specialists may yet be
somewhat off in having settled upon this last date as the year in
which that still mysterious event occurred which represented such an
all-embracing starting point for later Maya time-reckoners. But, in
view of the other similarities, its use by the latter as a date of the
highest religious im****tance to their race, as well as its close
coincidence with 3102 BC, a date of tremendous spiritual significance
to the Brahmans and other orthodox Hindus, is rather amazing.
Our present humanity, sometimes called the Aryan, had its origins in
central Asia, somewhere in that now barren region to the north and
west of the Himalayan chain looking down upon modern India to the
south. Early Aryan peoples went forth from this region in all
directions. So far, however, they are most clearly traced going
westward into what is now Iran and the surrounding zones of the Mid-
East, and to the south where they became the forebears of some of the
historical peoples of India, Ceylon, and southeast Asia. The Hindu
nations of the historical period thus are direct descendants of the
earliest peoples to compose the present world "race." Their records
show them encountering and conquering other peoples as they went south
into the subcontinent. It takes little imagination to conceive that in
the course of this trek they could have acquired astronomical
knowledge from remaining representatives of the high Asura caste of
the great astronomer Asuramaya. The area even of present-day Tamils
includes southeast India (Madras state) as well as the north and east
of the island of Ceylon lying south of the mainland.
If this could have taken place, then why couldn't similarly learned
caste groups among the ancestors of the Central American races known
as the Maya have also derived their advanced astronomical system from
the same source -- Asura wise men and astronomers such as the
personage named Maya the Asura? But in part we cannot answer this
question very definitely because to this day (1973) the narrative
glyphs composing the written Mayan records remain unreadable. Only the
numerical ****tions can be deciphered, and little is as yet known about
the longer time periods these refer to. If the relatively voluminous
narrative records accompanying the time glyphs could be read, there is
good reason to believe they would shed valuable light on archaic
events associated with the recorded time cycles, and therefore upon
the early history and possibly even the origins of these advanced
peoples.
The evidence of both Central American archaeology and the Mayan
peoples' accounts of their own origins suggests an emigration into
that region by already advanced races much more strongly than it does
an indigenous evolution from a supposititious cave existence. Formerly
archaeologists regarded the Mayan culture itself as the earliest
horizon of sophisticated Central Americans. But a more recently
discovered, even older people, the Olmec, appear to have lived from
the lowlands facing the Gulf of Mexico to as far west as the Pacific
mountain ranges of Guatemala. Comparison of stone and jade artifacts
of the latter-day Aztecs flouri****ng at the time of the Conquest with
those of Maya predecessors and the earlier Olmecs shows no degradation
in style or workman****p. In fact, the Olmecs appear to have arrived on
the scene in full-blown possession of sophisticated cultural
achievements. Among these was use of the advanced numerical glyph
system, thought until recently to have been a later invention by the
Mayas themselves. Archaeologists now readily admit they have no idea
where the Olmec came from. What is apparent here is a direct line of
evidence of high mathematical, astronomical, artistic, and engineering
achievement going right back to prehistory. This presupposes a fairly
lengthy development somewhere: it obviously is not the product of
primitive cave men. We tend to forget that cave-dwelling groups of
undeveloped peoples have always been found -- and are found today --
living alongside the great civilizations of every period. So that cave
men do not necessarily form the link in a linear chain of human
development that they have been said to represent.
The Spanish narrator Bernal Diaz del Castillo recorded that Montezuma,
the Aztec ruler, told the conqueror Hernan Cortez, that his ancestors
had been conducted to Mexico by a ruler, whose vassals they were, and
who having established them there as a colony returned to his native
lands -- termed Aztlan -- to the East. The Mayan peoples of Chiapas
gave another early commentator, the priest Francesco Saverio
Clavigero, a similar account of their origins: following the Flood, a
personage called Votan had brought their ancestors to Central America
as groups of immigrants in successive voyages from the East. Votan,
they said, was responsible for constructing large cities in Central
America and also for establi****ng three tributary monarchies there
with capitals at Tulan, Mayapan, and Chiquimala. All this points to a
remote entrance onto the American continent of already advanced
societies.
The greater number of archaic Sanskrit records have not yet been
translated into Western languages. Even so there is a large body of
already translated works, and Hindu scholars exist who are able to
interpret their meaning as well as undertake further translations. The
wanton destruction by Spanish conquistadores of every Mayan manuscript
they could lay hold of, however, has left us with only a handful of
primary Mayance-language do***ents. Rapid killing and decimation of
the learned Mayan caste groups by these same Spaniards leaves us with
no one capable of translating or interpreting them. Moreover, Mayan
stone inscriptions are being destroyed in situ at an alarming rate by
adventurers who withhold knowledge of new jungle finds which they saw
up, without regard to their historic and archaeological value, and
then sell as individual artifacts to private art buyers.
A major problem could develop from attempts by our scholars to
interpret any newly-deciphered glyphs. Some effort might well be
devoted to a search within present-day Mayan communities for any
persons trained in the reading of the classic glyph language. This
could prove far from easy of accomplishment, however, even if such a
person or persons still live. The Mayan interpreter would first have
to be willing to divulge what for him and his society must be sacred
knowledge to descendants of that race which so brutally subjugated and
despoiled his own. It is true that in recent years some similarly
trained representatives of North American Indian societies have given
out certain ****tions of their people's sacred history to members of
the European race, but this has been an unusual occurrence, and there
remain enormous if intangible barriers to any full inter-culture
communication.
There is every likelihood that the Mayan representative would share
the belief of his northern brother that real knowledge -- as
contrasted with merely superficial data -- is a sacred patrimony
conveyable only to those among his descendants who demonstrate that
they merit receiving it: that is, whose inner strength of character
and way of living assure that this information will not be misused or
abused. Is it conceivable that -- if he still exists -- such a Mayan
can at any time since the Conquest some five hundred years ago have
decided it were at last possible to pass on his people's ancient
mysteries to the white invader, much as an Asuramaya may have done so
long ago with members of the then-new Aryan immigration? The critical
element governing such a transmission could well be the Mayan's
*****sment of the European's true motives for desiring that knowledge
and of the whole range of possible uses to which the latter might put
it once obtained. At present all that may be said is that the several
convergences between ancient Mayan and Hindustan cultures brought out
above only highlight the great gaps in our actual knowledge of what
must have been for both peoples a racial history of epic pro****tion.
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